When we had our first child, Mike and I were living in Luang Prabang, in Northern Laos. There was no such thing as a mother’s group. In fact, there were very few other mothers who spoke English, and at that stage my Lao was—and I’m being gentle in this assessment—terrible.

I’ve been a mother for just over four years now, and we have a two year old, as well. After being so isolated during the first two years of my journey as a parent, I’m continually surprised and delighted by just how many good ideas I can glean from hearing or reading about other parent’s practices.

In the spirit of sharing things that have helped us over the years, I’ve been meaning to write a detailed post about “things we do around here” with our two little boys for a while now. I called these things “parenting hacks” when I first started working on this post, but something about that didn’t sit right. The things I’m talking about here aren’t clever tricks or quick fixes–they’re just our normal life.

So instead of “hacks”, I’ve decided to call them “tacks” instead. When you tack a boat you change course to steer into the wind, and what is parenting a lot of time but paying close attention to the weather and steering into the wind? (And if you have no idea what I’m talking about here, you must have been graced with a brood full of sunny, easy-going babies. Enjoy.)

So without further ado, here are ten things we do that help us sail into the wind more gracefully, and stay sane along the way…

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1. Try to embrace the 80/20 rule

We all have things we want our kids to do and learn, right? Even the most relaxed parents among us probably want their kids to say please and thank you, handle their frustration appropriately, be kind to others, and refrain from peeing down the playground slide in the school-yard. Among other things.

These are worthwhile targets to be working on with our kids. However, in focusing on these goals, it’s easy to make too big a deal out of it (or feel like a parenting failure) every time your kid wakes up oppositional and grumpy, or doesn’t measure up to scratch.

Especially on days when no one is within spitting distance of “scratch”, Mike and I try to remind ourselves of the 80/20 rule. In other words, we’re doing great if 80% of the time things go pretty well in relation eating, teeth brushing, talking nicely, bedtimes, etc. And the rest of the time? Well [shrug] 20% of the time things are just going to go pear shaped. We’re going to have hours (or, um, days) where survival is the name of the game. And right in the middle of a playground photo shoot for his book-week costume, someone is going to decide that peeing down the slide at school is an acceptable thing to do.

Take a deep breath, throw a bucket of water on the slide, and put it in the 20% pile.

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2. Make summer oatmeal

Our first child, Dominic, was practically an anorexic toddler. Our second, Alex, is built like a baby panda bear but he’d strongly prefer to only eat cereal, toast, noodles, and iceblocks. Ever. So I’m always on the lookout for easy, nutritious, and tempting things to feed the kids. Summer Oatmeal has been a total winner in our household. I mix up some oats, chia seeds, dried fruit, yogurt, milk and a splash of juice in a mason jar every night, let it sit, and then dish it out in the morning. Both children usually eat it willingly and often ask for more. (Check out this Yummy Life post for good summer oatmeal recipes)

Other food staples that have served us well include French toast, porridge with cinnamon and raisins, fruit shakes, bananas, yogurt, sticky rice, and home-made ice-blocks. We mostly make ice-blocks out of some combination of bananas, yogurt, and milk and lace them with chia Seeds and organic green vegetable powder. I’ve only seen Alex reject two ice-block combinations. One was made out of frozen pumpkin soup, and the other was laced with too much kale juice.

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3. Read books

I aim to read the children at least four books a day. Sometimes we don’t hit that number (or any number). Some days we read more. Because we’ve spent all of our parenting years living in countries without English-language libraries, I’ve become an avid children’s book collector. Here are a look at some of our favorites (click covers for more details):

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4. Make home-made playdough

I’m not one of those mothers who loves a crafty mess. To be honest, I’d prefer the kids not play with paint, glue, or glitter at home. But playdough is another story. I found this short YouTube video about making your own playdough and was so pleasantly surprised by how easy it was. Also, it keeps forever if you store it in a plastic bag in the fridge. (Don’t make the no-bake stuff. It never turns out nearly as well, and the cooking method is actually faster, anyway.)

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5. Watch television

Those of you who have multiple young kids and manage to make dinner without turning on the television, I’d like to know your secret. TV can be a sanity saver in controlled doses, but our four-year-old is very sensitive and I’m very careful with what we let the boys watch. We’ve never had cable or even been able to access the kids channel in the places we live. Because everything they see on the TV comes from DVDs, I’ve had an unusual degree of control over their viewing. Here are the shows and movies that the boys watch.

PlaySchool: A truly excellent Australian ABC program involving live presenters, storytelling, crafts, cooking, singing, and dancing. If the kids could only watch one program between two and five, this would be my pick.

Go Diego Go and Dora The Explorer: I would be delighted if I never again had to hear the theme songs from these shows, but the boys love them. Their tripartite quest-driven structure is engaging, and they are gentle and positive. Diego, in particular, incorporates animal-friendly and conservation messages and both shows teach some basic Spanish vocabulary. 

Blues Clues: This show is the product of some excellent psych research on how to teach things to children via television. It is a single premise show (it makes no effort to include wordplay or jokes that will appeal to adults) so it seems slow and boring for adult viewers, but is very well paced for kids. When they run the series on TV, they run the same episode every day all week. Young children dote on repetition and it is essential for learning. So don’t hesitate to put this show, in particular, on repeat. 

Charlie and Lola: A fabulous and quirky British series about a sibling pair. Love the gentle and positive messaging about sibling interactions in this one.

Lady And The Tramp: This is such a well-paced movie for sensitive and young kids. Both kids will watch and enjoy at the same time. The only other movies they watch are Aristocats (also a very old film), Winnie the Poo, and Curious George.

Mighty Machines: An excellent documentary-style Canadian series filmed in the 1990’s about trucks, trains, boats, etc. Perfect for any child who really loves diggers or machines. Dominic adores this one, and it’s very educational.

Curious George: A sweet, lively, TV show that both kids enjoy. I mean, who doesn’t love curious little monkeys?

Tom & Jerry Cartoons: This one is a recent favorite for the kids, and I have mixed feelings about this show. On the one hand I admire the physical comedy and the sheer zaniness of these cartoons. Both kids will howl with laughter at them. However, I’ve noticed a sudden and sharp increase in aggressive language from Dominic since he started watching Tom & Jerry. When he gets angry with me now, he’s started telling me he’s going to get the bush knife and chop me in half. Or put me in the rubbish dump. Or tie me to a tree, and get the green lawn mower, and run me over. Or (my personal favorite) put me in the house, lock all the doors, light a match all by himself, and burn the house down.

When Dominic says these sorts of things I’m torn between being slightly horrified, being pleased that he’s trying to “use his words” to express frustration, and wanting to laugh. It’s a bizarre combination of emotions. Dominic has no idea of the seriousness of these sorts of statements–he’s simply trying to articulate the worst thing he can come up with–and I’m pretty convinced that they are being directly inspired by the high-energy and comedic physical assaults he’s seen on Tom & Jerry. I’ve started strictly limiting their exposure to this show.

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6. Play with trains

We’ve picked up our fair share of toys in our globetrotting—mostly from other expatriate families who have staged a large garage sale before leaving. The funny thing is, our kids spend most of their time not playing with their toys. They’d much rather be digging in the garden, cutting the grass with kitchen scissors (an all-time favorite activity in our household) or squirting the toilet duck and then scrubbing out the toilet.

However, there have been a couple of toys that have recently become worth their weight in gold (or excess baggage—same same, really). One of those has been Dominic’s balance bike. Another has been our Tomica plarail train set . Over time, we’ve collected a huge set of track and other pieces, and Mike and the boys have spent hours constructing tracks together and running trains on them.

Also, while we’re on high-value toys… our 12 foot trampoline has been worth every dollar we spent on it.

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7. Hire help in the house

I hesitated to include this, but it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that this has been one of the biggest benefits of our lives as expatriates in the developing world. Our staff in Laos and our staff here in Vanuatu have all become way more than hired help who do the dishes and the laundry—they are an integral and valuable part of our children’s lives. There is real wisdom in that classic saying “it takes a village to raise a child.” When you’re an expatriate parent and a lot of your village lives on the other side of the world, it can be really tough.

So we have—in part—hired our village. Having two full-time staff around here (a house-lady and a gardener) does more than allow me to work in the mornings. It also provides two additional loving parent-figures (one of them another man) for our children to love and learn from. It also allows Mike and I to go out together once a week without the kids, knowing that they are completely comfortable at home. This sort of uninterrupted time together—time we would probably not be granted during this season unless we lived within driving distance of parents or siblings—has really helped us stay more connected during the unusual challenges and massive upheavals we’ve faced during the last four years.

Dominic and Harry planting banana trees

Alex and Cynthia

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8. Play with the iPad

I’m just a little bit behind the curve ball when it comes to iPads and Apps. It was my mother who taught our kids how to use an iPad and searched out some of their first iExperiences. It was my parents who gave us our first iPad. I only saw my first app in action and figured out what all the fuss was about this time last year. Since then, though, the iPad has come in handy on numerous occasions.

Here are a couple of the best Apps we’ve installed: Amazing Alex (this is a seriously awesome mechanical problem-solving app, Mike and Dominic do this together), Endless Alphabet, Monkey Preschool Lunchbox and Monkey Preschool Fixit, Nighty Night! (so sweet, soothing, and good wind-down. Alex loves this one), Playtime by ABC (the playschool companion App), and The Human Body by Tinybop.

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9. Go to Preschool

I never thought I’d put our kids into a half-day school program the minute they turned three, but that’s what we did with Dominic. Two days before his third birthday he started attending a Montessori program in Laos five mornings a week. It wasn’t the easiest transition, but it was absolutely a good experience for him. Here in Vanuatu we’ve put him right back in a five morning a week program. We chose an English-speaking program over the French one, primarily because I am more concerned with nurturing his social skills at this point than cementing a second language.

As for Alex? Well, I’m hoping we can get him in to start a pre-school program before he’s three. He’s ready for it, and so am I.

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10. Sleep in separate bedrooms

This post is all about things that Mike and I actually do that help us as parents, not things we’d like to be doing. So, yeah. We have two kids who are “more restless than normal” when it comes to their sleeping. They usually wake up throughout the night. Alex often comes into our bedroom and climbs into our bed. And they get up early. Mike and I have spent way more than 50% of our nights during the last two years sleeping in separate bedrooms. When Alex was younger and we were in a bigger house, we would try to divide and conquer. Now that the boys are both sleeping in the same room, one of us will often sleep in the guest room while the other one is on kid patrol.

That’s way enough from me. What about you?
What are some of your parenting “tacks”? Do share what’s worked well for you. (Also, any iPad app recommendations?)